The Most Persuasive Color

by Kevin Hogan

There is a color that has an incredibly powerful effect on people at the nonconscious level. Want to know what it is?

Better...want to know what kind of motivation it's linked to?

(How's that for a sales and marketing advantage no one has proven for you before?!)

The Color Red Affects How People Function

The color red can affect how people function. Red means danger and commands us to stop in traffic. Researchers at the University of Rochester have now found that red also can keep us from performing our best on tests.

If test takers are aware of even a hint of red, performance on a test will be affected to a significant degree, say researchers at Rochester and the University of Munich.

The researchers' article in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on the effect of red on intellectual performance reveals that color associations are so strong and embedded so deeply that people are predisposed to certain reactions when they see red.

Andrew J. Elliot, lead author and professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, and his co-authors found that when people see even a flash of red before being tested, they associate the color with mistakes and failures. In turn, they do poorly on the test. Red, of course, is traditionally associated with marking errors on school papers.

"Color clearly has aesthetic value, but it can also carry specific meaning and convey specific information," says Elliot. "Our study of avoidance motivation is part and parcel of that."

The Study of Avoidance Motivation

Four experiments demonstrated that the brief perception of red prior to an important test--such as an IQ test or a major exam--actually impaired performance. Two further experiments also established the link between red and avoidance motivation when task choice and psychophysiological measures were applied.

The findings show that "care must be taken in how red is used in achievement contexts," the researchers reported, "and illustrate how color can act as a subtle environmental cue that has important influences on behavior."

Elliot and his colleagues didn't use just any color of red. He assessed the colors using guidelines for hue, saturation, and brightness, and purchased a high-quality printer and a spectrophotometer for the research. He was stunned to learn that results from earlier work on color psychology by others didn't control for saturation and brightness.

The article's hypothesis is based on the idea that color can evoke motivation and have an effect without the subject being aware of it.

"It leads people to do worse without their knowledge," says Elliot, when it comes to academic achievement. In one of the six tests given, for example, people were allowed a choice of questions to answer. Most of them chose to answer the easiest question, a classic example of how to avoid failure.

The researchers believe that "color carries different meanings in different contexts." If the context changes, the implications do, too. Elliot's next study will focus on physical attractiveness.

Co-authors of the article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, a publication of the American Psychological Association, are Arlen C. Moller and Ron Friedman, graduate students in the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology at the University of Rochester, and Markus A. Maier and Jörg Meinhardt at the University of Munich. The work was funded by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation, and a Friedrich Wilhelm Bassel Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to Andrew Elliot.

Kevin Hogan Reveals Secrets of Symbols and Language and How They Influence

Kevin Hogan will take you on a journey of discovery, revealing symbols and language that you will recognize from your own experiences in life and you will be introduced to new ways to magically open up your world to others. And discover how the people around you use metaphors in their own lives.
An advanced home study program in changing behavior, learning and reprogramming minds.

You find out how to Make Magic With Words - Use metaphors to create change. You will learn how to translate metaphors into tools that create new neural pathways, in yourself and in others.

Unlike what everyone else is teaching out there, with this program you will learn how to get into the other person's brain, find the metaphors they have, and cause change.

Other things you will learn:

How metaphors expose things like racial prejudice.

Find out how and why metaphors have developed based upon your body parts (right on the nose!). Every body part is a metaphor for something else in the environment. Once you know these, you will be able to communicate with others more effectively, and persuade them faster.

Metaphors utilize a map to allow you to gain understanding and make things easier to remember.

How to use metaphors to covertly communicate the messages and beliefs that you want others to believe. Anybody who needs to persuade, needs to be able to tap into the metaphors in other people's brains.

Learn the XYZ metaphor formula for mapping into other people's brains, thus making it easier to gain compliance.

Have you made a commitment to finding out the metaphors in the lives of the people around you? If you have, you will succeed. Others are generally not even aware of their own metaphors. But they are easy for you to discover.

Also, Kevin will take you through step by step on a metaphorical journey, so that in any situation in life that you're facing, you'll be able to use this 10 min. metaphor and access your unconscious mind to find solutions to positive outcomes.

In addition to that, you will discover that there are cultural metaphors that allow us to map from your brain to my brain and that you can use them in communicating with other people and persuading other people. Kevin's going to show you what those are.

Each culture brings its own metaphors into its people's lives and environments. Make sure you are aware of what those are and how it will affect their attitudes!

You learn how to help other people develop the strength to “climb the mountain”, to “walk the long road ahead of them”. And when you realize that's how they are thinking of it, and you walk in their world, the metaphors you use trigger off the right neural pathways in their brain, and allow them to make the changes you suggest.

You will also learn:

Kevin is going to show you how to construct a metaphor piece by piece.
Once you have the right metaphors, you will find out once you have the right map, their map, you can show them the obvious solutions to problems because you will be able to communicate metaphorically with them, when, if you would have tried to communicate otherwise, your message would have been rejected outright.

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Mark Estlick, Seattle, WA